Flying upwards over the mountain
by Reikah
Summary: AU. Returning wounded from a mission to a neighboring country, Kurogane is rescued by a mysterious mute hermit with a curious pet eagle. There is more to both man and bird than meets the eye, however, and fairy tales meet Kurogane pretty much head on.
1. Act 1: chapter 1

**Note:** This is an alternate universe fairy tale based on equal parts _Ladyhawke_, _The Wild Swans_ and _The Three Ravens_. It is currently PG-13 but may rise to an R rating later on. I currently have some 24,000 words of the story written, about ~40% of the plot, but I decided to start posting now to motivate me to finish up. Many thanks to Mikkeneko, Uakari, Bottan, Fieldofclover and ShadowsofEgypt for holding my hands while writing it!**  
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**Flying upwards over the mountain**

_once upon a time there was a forest, a dark and dangerous place where no good came to pass. mist rolled through the trees and nothing good and clean lived there. armies would match for months to avoid it; animals that entered never returned; birds would fly over it._

_it was a forest full of werewolves and trolls, where the bright glint of a lake concealed a kappa often as not, where demons dwelled. it was an old forest, so old it had never known the blade of an axe or the footstep of a hunter, and for years nothing human lived there._

_and then came the two who were one; a terrible sorcerer, some said. a man who controlled the devil itself in the form of a monstrous bird. others said the man himself was the bird; others said there were two men, or two birds. the man who might be a bird was a crafty creature, a cursed creature, and he lived alone in a house of bile and hate, sewing a robe of black magic. it was said he sewed with a needle of human bone and a thread made of hair from his every victim, and if he sewed your name into his evil robe, you would meet an untimely death._

_well, would you brave the woods?_

* * *

><p>They stopped chasing him at the forest boundary.<p>

His horse was dying under him, foundering, and he drove it on with the flat of his sword, teeth gritted against the pain. His blood had soaked through his clothing, and there was a sizable stain pouring down the horse's steel grey side; he'd taken an arrow to the shoulder, at least, and the cuts across his ribs made him breathless. The pain he felt from his ribs was eclipsed only by his broken arm, which sent warm waves of agony through him with every lurching, stumbling step the horse took. The reins were looped over the saddle bow; he stayed mounted through bloody minded stubbornness alone, directing the beast with his thighs.

They had been hounding him for hours, at this point. The rest of his unit had died at their hands, but he had to return to the castle, had to bring his news back if it was the last thing he did. The forest might be cursed but it also contained the fastest route back; the fact that his pursuers were foolishly superstitious was an unexpected bonus.

The forest seemed less threatening at speed, even in the dark. They splashed through a stream of murky black water, his horse struggling up the far bank; it was holding up about as well as could be expected given that its condition wasn't much better than his. Kurogane cursed and hit it again. The further it could take him before it finally died, the better.

Fucking _Valeria_. It was a cesspit of a country, anyway, a small unimportant place on the edge of the world. Its chief export was its furs and its small, semi-precious stones, and it was not worth _dying for_ and so he wouldn't. He wouldn't have even needed to be in the fucking place if its larger neighbor hadn't conquered it. Kendappa had sent him and his comrades to see what the mood was like, and fuck, his horse was slowing down, it would be dead soon, and he was still at least a week away from Shirasagi on foot.

He made it a further fifteen minutes before the beast collapsed on the banks of another stream, a deeper one. He managed to roll off it in time to avoid crushing his leg, but it was a close thing. His vision sparked and whited out for a moment, but there was no sound of pursuit. If he could just - staunch the bleeding, he could -

He pulled aside his cloak and for a moment he could so nothing but stare. He thought he could see bone through the torn remnants of his armor, but he wasn't sure. He should wash it, he thought muzzily. Clean the wound.

It was hard to walk to the stream - his knees felt weak and his legs seemed to shake. He didn't have a cup and his helmet was the wrong shape, so when he got to the water he had to drop to his knees and dip his hands in. The water looked almost black in the absence of light, but it was clear and colorless in his palm, and smelled right, so he carefully trickled it over the wound.

A wolf howled mournfully in the distance, and wing beats sounded above him. He looked up, thinking he could see a silhouette against the starry sky; a shape moved on one of the branches. _Just a bird,_ he thought, and scooped up another handful of water.

The fluttering sound came again, closer, and when he looked up this time he thought he recognized the outline of the bird; an eagle, which had no business flying anywhere at night. The superstitious muttering concerning this forest came to him then, but Kurogane had never had time for folklore even when he wasn't on an urgent mission, and so he poured the water over his side and pulled his tanto out from his belt, laying it prominently on the rock next to him. Let this so-called sorcerer come. No wizard could stand good strong steel, especially not with six inches of it buried in his gut.

The eagle croaked at him, that horribly unmajestic noise that always sounded so strange coming from such big birds, and then launched itself into the air with a frenetic beat of its wings; Kurogane tensed, but it was flying away from him. Good. He'd been stupid anyway, getting worked up over a stupid _bird_; what could a bird do against an armored man?

He leaked a few more handfuls of water over the wounds, and then took off his cloak and, using his teeth and the tanto, tore it in half. With fumbling fingers he tied the larger half as tight as he could around his middle. It was hard to tie knots one-handed, but his other arm hurt too much to move. Fashioning a sling out of the other half was near impossible, so he settled for wrapping his broken arm up tightly and then tucking the spare ends of the cloth under the shoulder strap of his armor.

Slowly he got to his feet. The parts of him that didn't outright hurt ached. He was still bleeding, and every part of his body was announcing its impending retirement, but he thought he could make it at least to the northern village. Perhaps he could find someone there to bring his message to the capital.

Around him the forest seemed full of teeming life. He picked Ginryuu up; it had been strapped to the horse's saddle, but thankfully not on the side the beast had collapsed toward. His family blade fit neatly at his waist like it always did.

His boots scuffed up clods of dirt and leaf mould as he staggered onward, steadying himself against trees. He left smears of red behind on the bark, stains that shone wet and bright, and each step seemed to take more out of him. His sword felt heavier with each dragging moment, but he knew he couldn't stop; he was the only survivor of the scouting mission, he had to press ahead.

Kurogane kept on grimly as his wounds pumped more blood into his clothing, as the wolf howls grew nearer. His feet seemed to lag lower with every step, his breath seemed to come harder, but his determination was ferocious, and he was famed at court for being stubborn for a goddamn _reason_. There was a deep aching burn in his muscles, and his vision seemed lighter at the edges. His head felt strange, woozy like he'd taken a whack to the skull. He leaned heavily against an oak tree and panted for a moment.

An eagle landed on the branch of the tree opposite him, its shadow unmissable even in the dark, and he glared at it. It probably wasn't the same one. Was it? His thoughts seemed slow and distant, and the tree felt so comfortable.

Perhaps he could stop here, just for a while. Just to catch his breath.

The eagle spread its wings and called softly as he slid to the ground, which felt softer than the best cushion he'd felt. Ginryuu was wedged tightly against the tree, her hilt jabbing into his spine, but he felt too tired to move it. The arrow wound on his shoulder was still bleeding, and he could feel the stickiness of his armor where it touched both that and the rib-deep cut against his side. He'd suffered worse, of course, he wasn't going to die here, just... stop. For now.

The last thing he saw before the dark took him was the outline of the eagle in the tree, and distantly, through the thick trunks, a shining light that could have been a torch.

* * *

><p>He drifted in and out of consciousness, alternating between patches of blackness and vivid bright dreams full of colour and fear. One day he rode through the forest fleeing pursuers, but his horse ran through a thorn bush the likes of which he'd never seen and the wicked barbs actively chased him, impaling him; another time he saw faceless shadows writhing and twisting through the air, insubstantial and wraith-like. He saw a man in black robes, the flash of a pair of eye-glasses; he saw a girl whose face was hidden in shadow, but whose eyes glowed brilliantly green.<p>

One particularly nasty dream came halfway through. He was in a cold room - it felt high up, the air was thin. Someone he loved was next to him, their fingers were entwined, but the other person was _dying_, their blood oozing across the floor until it filled the room, ankle-deep and then higher; and it crept up to cover his mouth and he tried to sit up but couldn't, his ribs one long scream of pain. The blood kept flowing, pouring from the person he loved, and it covered his mouth and poured oily and slick down his nose, it was in his _throat_, coppery and sweet, and he found himself crying with pain and guilt as he drowned; words poured out of his throat: _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I love you._

He dreamed something cold was touching his face then and recoiled violently, flailing out with his fists; he hit it solidly, he could feel the starburst of pain across his knuckles, but then his wrists were pressed down firmly and bound together. The unseen thing he had struck morphed in his eyes to a glowing blue-eyed demon, that bared its fangs and roared; he growled back it, furious and belligerent until the end. _Fuck you._

At one point he was in his childhood home, watching his mother spin brilliantly colored threads between her fingers. She wore the light shift she wore in the house, when she did not have to be the shrine Miko and the village mage, its weather-witch and seer and mind-reader. Her eyes glowed faintly as she spun, a dull green that felt like home. _I miss you,_ he told her. _I think I'm dying._ She looked up at that and shook her head, fondly patronizing, the expression she always wore when he was wrong about something but she loved him anyway, and then she faded into smoke.

He saw Tomoyo standing by her scrying pool, her hair loose and unbound; he was standing in front of her with the water between them. He cried out to her as she touched her fingers to the surface of the pool, and as he did so the waters began to churn violently and she started backward, away from him. _Princess,_ he thought fitfully. _Princess, I tried._

He dreamed he was an eagle, soaring in the thermals over the wide green expanse of forest. His feathers shifted in the wind; he flew lazily, with nothing else to do and no particularly pressing need to hunt. He felt dimly his own surprise at his presence, as though he were two beings at once, and then the bird banked downward toward the woods and his thoughts unraveled into explosions of color and the sweet stench of infected wounds.

He jerked awake to find he was soaked through but with sweat rather than blood. Movement caught his eye; a person sat next to him, and with every gesture of their arms a brilliant rainbow trail curled through the air following their movement. _Please,_ Kurogane tried to say, but couldn't remember what it was he was asking for. His joints felt full of ground glass and steel. The rainbow figure placed a finger to his lips, and then drew a shining blue rune in the air.

He slept.

* * *

><p>When he awoke next the brilliant false edges had faded from his vision. He was lying on something soft, with what felt like an entire country's worth of furs and blankets piled on top of him; he flexed his fingers and toes and was unsurprised to find hot, wrapped rocks had been pressed against his side. He'd been feverish before, but never that bad. His skin felt gross with dried sweat, and now his fever had broken he felt stifled and burning, but when he moved to push some of the furs off him his ribs and shoulder both hissed a warning, sharp jagged bolts of pain that made him white out temporarily.<p>

It hurt to move his neck and look around, but Kurogane forced himself to do so. He was in a circular hut or cabin of rough-hewn wood, not of Nihon design; it smelled of smoke and meat and the faint reek of sickness. He figured he was responsible for the latter; a fire on a raised stone dais in the center of the room accounted for the smoke. There was a cauldron suspended over the fire on a steel spit, which probably provided the meat portion of the scent triad. He sniffed, experimentally, and was relieved; he would recognize the scent of venison anywhere.

Deer had been quite common in Suwa, as a landlocked province with only a river to provide fish, and his father had been generous allowing his people to hunt them; it was impossible to stand in Suwa village and not smell venison stewing in dozens of cookpots. His mother used to prepare a wonderful broth, before she grew too sick to help with the household chores and instead chose to focus her powers on the shrine. Somehow the smell reassured him, even now, even in a stranger's home.

His head pounded with a dull, insistent ache, and his throat was dry; there was a jug on the table next to his bed along with a small clay cup. Moving like an old man, Kurogane fretfully pushed some of the furs away and tried to reach for it, but his hands were shaking badly and he broke into a sweat just at this much exertion. He had just bitterly collapsed against the bed again when the door blew open, letting in a swirl of snowflakes, and a tall man in a long, hooded coat.

There was a dark leather glove on one hand, stretching over the sleeve of the coat, and a tawny eagle was perched on it, unhooded and unjessed. His other arm was occupied pinning something against his chest, and so he had to lean against the door and bodily force it closed, but not before letting in a draft of icy air that made Kurogane wish he had not pushed the furs away. The man wore that thick coat, but Kurogane himself had only bandages across his chest. It hadn't been anywhere near snowing, the last he remembered clearly, and he wondered how long he had been sick for.

The bird took off from the man's arm while he was busy securing a latch on the door, and Kurogane tracked it as it flew to a wooden stake jutting out of the wall itself at the foot of his bed. It resettled its wings and shifted a little on the perch, its long talons digging into the wood, and cocked its head at Kurogane, intense golden eyes focusing on his face. It called, a light _eee_ sound that was strange for such a large creature.

The stranger whirled and stared at Kurogane, and as the building was alien to Nihon, so too was this man; tall and pale, with silver-blond hair that looked more Valerian than anything else, and bright blue eyes currently wide in surprise. Kurogane studied him in fascination, aware that it was a mutual thing, and said nothing, waiting for the stranger to speak; instead the man lifted his hand and jabbed a finger to his chest, as if indicating himself, and then raised it and drew a line across his lips. Kurogane frowned.

"I speak Valerian," he said in that tongue, before switching back to his, "as well as Nihongo. Do you?" His voice was raspy and hoarse, even to his own ears, and his lungs felt heavy and wet in his chest; he coughed despite himself. The stranger pulled back his hood with the arm clad in the falconry glove and deposited the item he'd been holding underneath his other arm on a poorly carved worktable near the door. It was a slab of meat, wet and red and cut, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes at the sight of it.

Casually the blond peeled off the falconry gauntlet and then his long and heavy overcoat, revealing a pale tunic underneath that was washed but stained; it covered him from ankle to throat. He tossed it onto a second table, his remaining glove following, and then stamped ice off his boots. The eagle called softly to him and he paused to scratch its nares; it flipped its wings and crooned like a cat in contentment.

"How long have I been here?" Kurogane asked in his native language, narrowing his eyes, and the blond held up three fingers. "Days?" he asked hopefully, but already knew he would not be so lucky before the man started shaking his head. Weeks, then. Just his luck. The sooner he was on his way the better; Amaterasu would not wait forever.

The stranger crossed to his bedside and took the jug Kurogane had reached for, pouring the water therein into the clay cup. He offered this to Kurogane, helping him steady it; Kurogane felt a humiliated flush creep through his cheeks at being so damn _dependent_. At least the blond wasn't laughing at him; he was studying Kurogane's face even as he drank, which wasn't that much better. If Kurogane hadn't been so fucking thirsty he might have made a scene, rescuer or not, but the water was sweet on his tongue.

He drank slowly, allowing himself small mouthfuls and swallowing those a bit at a time, and the stranger raised an eyebrow in approval. He had a handsome face, sharp-featured and young; he looked too young to be a hermit, too smooth and unscarred to be an ordinary woodsman, even in these woods. He had a faint greenish bruise over one eye, and Kurogane abruptly remembered his fever dreams; checking, he saw matching bruising across the knuckles of his left hand and winced.

"Thanks for saving me," he mumbled after the cup was empty and his throat felt less parched. The blond just smiled, a courtier's smile, all light and no warmth, and shrugged like it was no big deal. Like he saved dying men in these woods all the time, and nursed them back to health over three weeks when his supplies must surely be stretched alone out here on a regular basis. He hadn't talked, and the pantomime gestures he'd made at the start indicated he wouldn't, either.

"Are you a mute?" Kurogane asked. His voice sounded a lot less wrecked now he'd had something to drink, but it was still gruff. "Or under a vow?"

The man held up two fingers, indicating the second option.

"You got a name?"

Another smile, this one accompanied with an eye roll, the flaw in asking a mute for something as complex as a _name_ spelled out. Kurogane colored angrily, but the stranger was already turning away from him; he bent smoothly over the edge of the bed and his shoulders jerked as he fished around for something on the floor with both hands. When he sat up, Ginryuu was balanced across his palms, sheathed. Kurogane bristled.

"That's my sword," he said, warningly, although he felt weak as a kitten right now and wasn't sure he could beat even this scrawny foreigner in a fight. The blond had to have some hidden reserve of strength to have dragged him all the way back _here_, wherever _here_ was.

The stranger nodded amiably enough, however, and leaned over Kurogane to prop his father's sword between the wall and himself. She didn't fit quite comfortably, but Kurogane felt something in his chest loosen in relief at having her there. The eagle made a small, irate noise from its perch, and the blond turned to look at it.

He was still wearing that idle fake courtier's smile, that twisted his mouth and didn't touch those brilliant eyes. His hair fell raggedly long around his jawline, and the collar of his tunic was turned high, no doubt to protect from the biting cold, but Kurogane thought he saw a glimpse - a flash - of silver around his throat for a second as he moved, before whatever it was fell beneath the concealment of fabric once more.

Kurogane wondered how lonely a man had to be to go this much effort on behalf of a stranger, and then cut that train of thought off. It was uncomfortably close to home.

* * *

><p>The stranger was a solicitous and amiable host, which was better than Kurogane could have asked for, as he was an awful patient. He hated being dependent on others, and if his message hadn't been urgent he would have tried to leave much sooner. As it was, he lasted a week - a week of sleeping back his strength from the blood loss and fever, and relying on the stranger to help him eat and drink and piss, for gods' sakes, a week of allowing the stranger to examine his <em>wounds<em>, getting closer than he liked people to get - before he had enough and decided he would be well enough to trudge not to Shirasagi, but to the northernmost Nihon village.

He realized after perhaps a half-week that he had been placed in the blond's own bed, and at the time he merely felt stupid for not noticing sooner; of course the man only had one bed. The stranger himself had been sleeping on the floor, when he slept at all.

The stranger - who he was mentally starting to think of as Eagle, for his bird, which went everywhere he did and seemed to respond to him less like a bird of prey and more like a more domesticated animal, like a dog - seemed to spend an awful lot of time outside his cabin. He was out when dawn struck and out at twilight, too, with his eagle by his side, and he only returned late at night with his blue eyes glowing faintly as though he had just performed magic. Maybe Kurogane was just sleeping through his coming and going, which was highly unlikely but not impossible given how fucking _weak_ he felt - but the man seemed to be outside for a large amount of time, only returning to check on his dressings or stew up more food.

Kurogane said nothing. He thought he remembered the rune drawn shining in the air from his fever dream; he was too sick to move himself, he could offer this strange magician woodsman nothing.

He still hadn't said a word, and he was a mystery. His coloring marked him quite clearly as being _gaijin_, but his clothing was in the northern Nihon style, and there were many tools and utensils inside the hut that looked Nihingo in make. The hut itself looked Valerian, from what Kurogane had seen of their houses while he had been in that country, but from the level of smoke staining the walls he rather suspected it was older than Eagle.

Other than that there was nothing abnormal about it, not really. It was normal from the strings of drying vegetables hanging from the roof to the firewood stacked inside to keep it dry from the snow, and none of it told him anything useful about the stranger, and with Eagle himself studiously keeping outside and thus unavailable for questioning Kurogane found himself...

... Well, _bored_.

It was a strange feeling. He hadn't been bored for this long before; even when he wasn't actively out on assignment, back at Shirasagi, there were assassination plots to foil and intelligence to gather, or political scheming to watch over from the outside while guarding the Tsukuyomi. He couldn't recall the last time he'd been stuck for this long with nothing to do but _heal_, and resolved to get done with it and get on the road as soon as possible.

It was still a week before he could sit up by himself, though. Eagle had changed his bandages, sniffing the old ones for signs of infection, before smiling at Kurogane to let him know he had escaped the worst. The wound over his ribs pulled every time he moved; Eagle had stuck padding over it with a kind of sticky foul-smelling poultice smeared over it, and then wound long bandages around Kurogane torso and shoulder to keep it in place. He had been very close to Kurogane while he worked, and Kurogane, who didn't particularly wish to see his own wound, had kept his eyes firmly fixed on that crown of blond hair.

When he was satisfied the bandages were secured, Eagle stepped back to the cauldron and filled Kurogane a bowl of the brown bubbling stew therein; he pulled a face as he passed it over, as if to apologize for its tastelessness. Kurogane didn't care; it was the sweetest thing he had ever tasted, especially because he could eat it himself without the blond's help steadying the bowl. His hands only shook a little bit as he spooned up the stew, and when he was finished he put it back in the bowl and passed it back to Eagle, who was watching him with his arms folded. His bird was on its perch by the foot of the bed, preening.

"I need to get home," Kurogane said, and the stranger's expression changed subtlety. He pressed his bare hands to the bed, preparing to push himself to his feet, and Eagle took a step back. "I have an important message to deliver for my boss. Thank you for your hospitality."

Eagle smiled then, a heavy-lidded thing that didn't look quite real, and unfurled his arms; he pointed at Kurogane with one hand, then wrapped the others tightly around his sides and mimed violent shivering. Kurogane scowled, but Eagle wasn't finished; he pinched at the fabric of his coat, pointed at Kurogane again, and then touched his ribs where Kurogane's own wound had been located, indicating a hole in the fabric of the coat. He then mimed the wound reopening, with a lot of finger wriggling that Kurogane took to mean blood.

"I've survived with worse," Kurogane told him darkly, and Eagle rolled his eyes and raised his arm up, flapping his thumb against his stiff fingers to convey that Kurogane's words were just hot air. Kurogane growled at him warningly and Eagle stared at him with wide eyes before he caught himself; he didn't want to intimidate the man who had saved his life. Before he could apologize however, Eagle's eyes crinkled in amusement and he threw his head back, his shoulders shaking, and it took Kurogane a second to realize the idiot was _laughing_ at him in his silent way. "The hell is with you, idiot?" he said, disgruntled.

Eagle pointed at him, then back at himself; he bared his teeth, then let his tongue loll out while pressing his fists against his ears, both fingers sticking up like shiba inu ears. The implication was quite clear: Kurogane was like a dog. The idiot's pet bird chirruped as if agreeing with him. Kurogane scowled at him, trying to work out why he had ever been curious about the gods damned moron.

The moron in question was walking now over to the cabin door, which he opened with a grand flourish, and Kurogane grunted as the icy air hit his bare torso. The world outside was white, and the wind, which had been a piercing whistle from inside the cabin, had a baying quality to it. The blond wasn't smiling anymore; he pointed at Kurogane and then out of the door, at the wintry landscape, and then fanned his fingers in front of his face, waggling them as if to indicate what Kurogane could lose to frostbite, and then held a hand out at about chest height. Kurogane took this to mean snow depth.

"I can't stay here for the whole winter," said Kurogane, wishing the man would close the damn door. He cast a quick glance around for his clothing, and, not seeing it, hauled the blanket around his shoulders. He was beginning to feel a little dizzy from sitting upright for so long, but was determined not to show it; the blond just raised an eyebrow.

For a long moment they just stared at each other, Kurogane growing increasingly irritated. Who was this man, to think he could order Kurogane around? He'd saved Kurogane's life, that didn't mean he could issue orders. With a growl, Kurogane forced himself up to his feet and up to his full height, swaying slightly, and through his vertigo he had the satisfaction of seeing the blond's eyes widen at just how tall he was. "Where are my clothes?" he said, trying to shake away the dizziness, and the blond's mouth went flat.

Before Kurogane could stop him Eagle had darted from the door to the bed and seized something - seized _Ginryuu_. Kurogane growled, lunging for his sword, but Eagle danced back a few steps, back to the door, and waggled the blade at him with a sly, teasing expression on his stupid face.

"Don't touch my fucking sword," Kurogane snarled, and the blond looked down at the blade in his hands and then half-twisted to toss it casually over his shoulder, out the door and into the snow. Kurogane stared at him, open-mouthed and utterly caught off guard by the sheer stupidity of the movement. Did the moron not _know_ about Nihon's warriors and their swords? The eagle whistled at its master, but the man simply rolled one shoulder loosely, smirking as if challenging Kurogane to come at him.

Instead, Kurogane staggered over to the door and brushed past the man, shouldering him out of the way and scanning the snowy outside for his sword. He saw her in the end, more for her scabbard than anything else, dark against the whiteness of the fresh-falling flakes. The snowdrifts came to knee-height already, although they had been trampled down around the entrance to the cabin, and Ginryuu stuck proudly out of one such snowdrift not twenty feet away.

He didn't have any shoes and nothing but bandages on his torso, and his head was pounding with a dull sort of ache, but he set one foot carefully on the tramped down path, gritting his teeth at the flaring _cold_ against the sole that made him step forward gingerly. His breath was shallow and he felt winded already; he could feel the scab covering his arrow wound had cracked open again, but he couldn't show weakness. It wasn't his way.

Naturally that was the moment Eagle tripped him with a well-placed kick that took his legs out from under him, and sent him crash-landing ass-first backward on the cabin floor, and stalked past him into the snow, shaking his head as he pulled Ginryuu out of the snow bank. His expression was exasperated. "The fuck," said Kurogane, indignantly trying to get his feet.

Eagle made a hand gesture that Kurogane was considered incredibly rude in Valerian, and pulled the door closed after him. While Kurogane struggled to get back upright - his limbs were heavy with exhaustion, and he'd done _nothing_, how could he be this weak? - the blond padded over to the bed, put Ginryuu back from where he'd stolen her, and retrieved Kurogane's blanket, which he threw at Kurogane with probably more force than necessary. He then folded an arm over his chest, and pointed with the other first at Kurogane, then at the bed.

The stranger's jaw was set, and there was an exasperated expression in his clear blue eyes; his eagle squawked and pushed itself off from the perch, coming to land on his shoulder with massive wing beats that blew his blond hair wildly in every direction. Its talons flexed and pierced the padding of its master's coat, and it cocked its head to one side, its wide predator's eyes fixed on Kurogane's above its hooked razor beak.

Kurogane went to bed.

Both Eagle and the eagle watched him do it, and at least there was no repeat of the 'doggy' mime this time. With his point proved and Kurogane resting - albeit grudgingly - the stranger seemed to relax a hair; he redid Kurogane's bandages, put some more rocks in the fire to warm up for the covers, and made Kurogane eat another bowl of stew before he let him alone. For his part Kurogane just glared at the blond from the bed, hating that the idiot had been _right_.

With this snow, though, Amaterasu's invasion plans would have to be halted anyway. Perhaps Kurogane could winter here and get back to Shirasagi for the spring and still be in time; he hoped so, because it didn't look like he'd be leaving here until he was quite well, which meant keeping Eagle and his strange bird company for a few more months.

Looked like he would be stuck with the idiot. Just his luck.

* * *

><p><em>tbc<em>


	2. Act 1: chapter 2

**Notes:** Apologies for the delay in updating; my computer died and I lost everything on it. Luckily I had most of this fic backed up, so I was able to salvage it, or I might have cried. Cried EPIC TEARS.

Either way, thank you for your feedback on part one! Onto part 2, in which there is exposition and mime.

Mostly mime.

* * *

><p>For the most part Kurogane spent the following fortnight asleep. It wasn't like there was anything else to do; no point in practicing katas when his muscles were too weak to lift Ginryuu's weight, no exercise to do when he felt dizzy and nauseous just from the effort of standing up. Eagle himself was busy as usual, but to Kurogane's surprise as his strength returned the man took to staying indoors for a few hours at a time to keep him company. It might even have been appreciated if he wasn't an annoying idiot.<p>

He hadn't thought anyone could piss him off this much without the use of their voice. He was turning out to be wrong; the blond had an astonishing ability to convey everything from sarcasm to sly teasing through nothing but body language, and he mocked Kurogane mercilessly, during the daylight hours when he was most active. At night he seemed calmer, more passive, although this didn't really help Kurogane because somehow he had trained the damn bird to bother him instead during the dark.

It was a brighter creature than he had thought, brighter than any of the birds the falconers back home trained. By day it seemed content to just watch its master acting the fool, but at night he had somehow taught it to badger Kurogane, stealing his eating utensils from his fingers while he was trying to use them, or dropping rocks on him from the hut rafters. If it wasn't one of them winding him up, it was the other, and no matter how many times Kurogane threatened a brutal beatdown when he was all healed up, both of them seemed to find it a great game to taunt him.

His injuries still bothered him, but as the days passed and the weather worsened they began to knit together as Kurogane's strength returned. Stubbornly he used the time Eagle was out doing whatever it was he did to do some basic stretches of his own, just trying to keep himself in some semblance of shape. He still couldn't do too much without tearing the wounds open afresh, but he did what he could as the days drew shorter and winter closed in around the hut.

The colder weather drove Eagle inside a little more, to Kurogane's annoyance. It was a small hut to start with, and even though it _was_ the blond's to begin with, after a few days it began to feel very cramped indeed. Eagle seemed unable to stay still, as restless as Kurogane as he performed dozens of small chores around his hut - filling in cracks in the walls to keep out drafts, cleaning and sharpening his tools, mending his clothing while cramped in the corner - and Kurogane sympathized.

He was beginning to feel more than a little cabin feverish, and Eagle's inability to speak didn't help there. The hermit seemed unused to having company, for he seldom initiated his mimes, just responded to Kurogane's questions or comments, unless they centered around his past in which case the blond pretended Kurogane wasn't there.

There was something naggingly familiar about him, although Kurogane couldn't put his finger on what it was; something about the angle of his cheekbones, the line of his mouth. Kurogane found himself studying the man, trying to find that point of recognition in his features; Eagle caught him at it a few times and made a great show of _leering_ at him, his eyebrows dancing and his mouth turning up in a smile that was teasing and sly and somehow off, like it was a pale copy of a real smile. Kurogane always was the one to break eye contact, usually with a _tch_.

The snow stopped after a few days, but Eagle managed to convey, via a series of complicated hand gestures mixed with more dog-related pantomiming that made Kurogane want to throw things at him, that this would be just a temporary break. He was in the process of collecting together their dishes when Kurogane woke up, evidently meaning to go wash them, and Kurogane abruptly decided that he'd had enough of staying indoors.

"I'll help," he said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in the the only set of clothes he had, the set that had been in his horse's saddlebags when he fled. The ones Eagle had found him with had been torn beyond repair.

Eagle flipped his head in disdain, eyeing him up and down, and conveyed with quick, jerky hand gestures that Kurogane was not to leave the hut.

"I'm not saying I'll go hunting wild fucking boar," Kurogane growled. "I just need to get outside before I go crazy cooped up in here."

Eagle shifted the dishes in their wooden tub to his other side and made a face, disbelieving, and Kurogane scowled at him. The blond tilted his head to one side, considering, and then reached out to the small table he used as a makeshift desk and picked up his carving knives, wrapped in a leather sheath; he put these in his tub atop the dishes, grabbed a whetstone, and a bar of tallow soap, and gestured for Kurogane to follow him. Before Kurogane had fully climbed to his feet he'd located a traveler's cloak that was a far too short for Kurogane, but made of some thick, coarse wool, with fur at the edges of the hood and the hem. It looked Valerian in make.

It was cold outside, a thin residue of ice still over the ground making it slippery as hell. Eagle took him across the clearing the hut was housed in to the rocky banks of the small stream not too far away, where he bent down and began to unload the dishes over the pale rocks. Kurogane awkwardly went to his knees next to him, surprised at how breathless he was just covering the short distance from the hut to the bank, and Eagle studied him cautiously before handing him the bar of soap and pointing out the dishes. His breath fogged in the air, and Kurogane tugged the cloak tighter around himself.

Eagle made a curious face, and Kurogane scowled at him, insulted. "Of course I know what to do," he said, scornfully, and Eagle grinned at him. He pointed at the dishes, then at the hunting knives, and then at the icy path stamped down out front of the hut; it took him a bit longer to convey the other chores he wanted done, but Kurogane watched him thoughtfully as he explained in his own mute way and then nodded.

After the blond had gone - into the woods with a quiver of hunting arrows and a bow, his bird gliding above his head silently from tree to tree - Kurogane breathed out slowly and settled to his task. He already knew how to do routine domestic tasks; he often spent days in the wilderness on missions, by himself or with only a few other ninja for company, and camp chores were split fairly evenly amongst them.

He did the dishes as fast as he could, the stream water numbing to his hands, and then tried them carefully off and pulled his gloves back on. They were only thin leather riding gloves, and stained where he had touched his bloody wounds with them, but they were warmer than nothing.

Kurogane didn't know how long he worked. It had been late afternoon, he thought, when he left the hut; it was twilight when Eagle returned with his bird on his shoulder, carrying a brace of thin, rather bedraggled rabbits by their ears. He had sharpened Eagle's knives - all of them, from the thin filleting knife to the curved skinning knife - taking the opportunity to examine their origin; they looked like his own country's, and he wondered how Eagle had acquired them. They weren't very good blades, although he figured they could butcher a rabbit quick enough for the stew. He wouldn't try wolf with them, let alone boar or caribou.

After _that_ he'd ashed down the icy trail Eagle had stamped into his surroundings, all those mysterious comings and goings leading into the forest itself. It wasn't hard work, but by the time he was done - or at least, out of ash - he had to sit down and catch his breath. His wounds had stayed closed, which was at least a small mercy.

He was enjoying the outside air, cold as it was, leaning with his back to the exterior of the woodshed propped against the building when Eagle approached; the man's leather boots had thick soles, of a make foreign to Nihon _and_ Valeria, and seemed held together with metal hobnails. It made them sound very distinctive on the ice and rocks.

Eagle came to a stop in the middle of the clearing and looked around, as if assessing Kurogane's work; he lowered the rabbits and touched his free hand first to his shoulder, then his ribs, raising his eyebrows. "I'm fine," Kurogane said in answer. "No bleeding."

This seemed to please Eagle, who beamed at him and ground his boot against the ashed rock he stood on, as if testing for friction. He was wearing furs and hunting leathers; his quiver, slung casually over one shoulder, wasn't notably emptier than it had been when he left. He looked about the clearing again, and then turned back to Kurogane, grinned at him, and let his tongue hang out, pink and panting.

"Oh, shut up," Kurogane groaned, and Eagle grinned and held up his catch in one hand; he pointed at the rabbits, then at the hut, and Kurogane pushed himself off the wall and came to take them. "We ought to store them outside," he said. "Let them last longer in the cold."

Eagle shook his head and raised both hands to mime doggy ears, but instead of panting he mimed tipping his head and howling at the sky. Kurogane grunted; he'd heard the forest wolves, but he didn't think they'd be bold enough this early in the winter to steal frozen carcasses from outside a human dwelling. Still, the hermit had been living here for longer than he had.

"I'll skin these," he said, opening the hut door and dumping the rabbits on the desk, and then grabbed the wood hatchet, turned around, and said, grinning, "catch."

Eagle did, with no problems at all. His reflexes were _fast_. He was grinning in a sly way Kurogane didn't like, though, and he narrowed his eyes at the blond and said, "What?"

Eagle pointed at him, the rabbits and the hut door in that order, and then mimed pulling his hair into a ponytail. He repeated the gesture when Kurogane blinked at him in confusion, and then held up his left hand and circled the fingers of his right around his index finger, and -

"Did you just call me a housewife?" Kurogane said, slowly, and Eagle grinned and nodded, and oh, that was _it_, that little bastard was going to get it, injuries or no.

He had to give up chasing the blond after maybe five minutes, kitten-weak and breathless, but he did manage to send Eagle sprawling face-first on the ground by throwing a branch at his legs to trip him up, so for now he contented himself that the insult had been repaid.

* * *

><p>Kurogane got his first clue to the blond's identity not two fortnights after his rescue, after a few days with no snowfall. His wounds were healing nicely by then, although there would definitely be huge scars left behind, and he was well enough to help with a few more strenuous chores, such as hunting; Eagle was a dead shot with a bow and good with a hunting knife, but with two of them instead of one he needed to take down bigger game to provide food, and dragging deer back to the hut was a difficult task for just one person. Kurogane was happy enough to help, but his feeble reserves of stamina were quickly drained by such work, and he tended to sleep for longer stretches of time.<p>

He was awoken one evening from just such a sleep, filled with warm, lazy dreams (involving his sword and the blond idiot, and strangely, a jar of honey) by something small and hard _thwacking_ into his face. He grunted and turned his head to one side, but a sudden draft woke him all the way up, and he opened his eyes to see the eagle standing on the bed next to his pillow. It held a small polished stone in its beak, and as he watched it fluttered back up to perch on the headboard, at which point it dropped the stone on him again.

"Fuck off," Kurogane said, grumpy with exhaustion. The eagle just flared its wings and beat them, blowing his hair away from his face, and with a low growl he pushed aside the heavy sleeping furs and sat slowly - so slowly, his ribs were still a solid mass of pain - upright. Ginryuu was within reach and he eyed her, wondering if he could skewer the goddamn bird without tearing open the wound in his side.

He discarded the notion as unfitting for a sword of Ginryuu's proud heritage, not to mention difficult. The eagle flew to land on the perch installed near the door and made its irritating chirping noise. It was watching him and somehow Kurogane had the feeling that if he tried to go back to sleep the fucking flying rodent would go back to pelting him in the face with stones.

"I don't know how he trained you," he told the bird, "But he probably could have saved time by punching himself in the face."

The eagle just shifted its grip on the wooden bar and croaked at him. It spread its wings and kept them spread. The fire was dying down, dying _out_, and in the embers the bird's feathers looked more coppery than brown.

Kurogane belted his robe closed more out of tradition than anything else; he certainly didn't care if the goddamn blond lunatic saw him naked again, _not at all_, and paused only to stamp on his boots and pull Eagle's thick fur coat off the back of the door before following it, stumblingly, out into the moonlight clearing. The coat was too small for him - there was no way he could button it up over his chest - but his own clothing was either too badly damaged for wear or not suitable to the chill in the air, and Eagle's coat was at least lined with fur.

By the twilight the stream was almost invisible, a thin trickle of black only discernible by its gurgling and the pale rock that surrounded it. The forest didn't feel so evil in the dusky evening light; the night insects filled it, and he could faintly hear the calling of owls, the howl of wolves. Natural sounds, normal sounds.

The eagle flew straight from the open door of the hut to the gnarled oak tree that its master had showed him yesterday, its bark carved and notched with heavy slashes of a knife. It roosted in one of the branches, and for a moment Kurogane was at a loss as to why the creature had brought him here (unless it was sheer bloody-minded torture, in which case like owner like goddamn bird) until he saw the darker shape lying folded on the pale rocks beneath it.

"Idiot," he said, bending over Eagle and touching his forehead with his fingers; the moron felt cold to the touch. He'd brought some furs out but not enough; the air was cold enough Kurogane's breath steamed, and it smelled like the respite from the snow would be over soon.

He shook the man gently, and when that failed shook him again harder. The eagle croaked at them both from the oak tree. "Wake up, moron," Kurogane said, shortly, and grabbed the man's tunic, jerking him with a considered lack of tenderness; that worked when nothing else did, and Eagle's eyelashes fluttered open even as he moaned in disapproval.

"You were freezing," Kurogane snapped, when the man went to push him away, and those blue eyes flashed in surprise before turning away, a thoughtful expression on his face. Kurogane sighed. "Look, I get that you don't want to... To scare me, or whatever, or you think I'll kill you in your sleep or _whatever_. But it was your bed first, and we can share. Especially if you're going to do something _stupid_ like this."

Eagle pursed his lips and Kurogane wanted to shake him again. He wasn't any happier about sharing the bed than this moron, no doubt, but if the blond died of the freezing shakes then Kurogane knew well enough to know his chances of survival dropped sharply.

The blond wouldn't look at him, but Kurogane could feel the gentle shivers rolling through him, and with a growl he took one of the furs the moron brought with him and threw it over the man's shoulders. His shivers slowed abruptly, but Kurogane wasn't done yet; using the folds of the furs to trap the stranger's arms, he clamped his arms around the fool's chest and threw him over one shoulder.

The man writhed and hissed, almost instinctively, and Kurogane's shoulder and ribs weren't gonna be thanking him for this anytime soon, but he couldn't free his arms and thus Kurogane toted him across the clearing and into the hut without fighting him to do so. The eagle swept along into the hut after them and Kurogane waited for the bird to be indoors before kicking the door shut and bolting it.

He dumped Eagle rather unceremoniously on the bed and sat down on the edge of it himself, trying to get his breath back and his head to stop spinning. He'd lost a lot of strength with the fever, but the blond was so light, so frighteningly light that he didn't hurt as much as he should. The wound over his ribs had opened a little, he could feel the wetness of the blood against the bandage, but it wasn't serious.

The eagle hopped into the headboard, and Kurogane turned as much as his ribs would let him to watch it; it made a light chirruping noise, and the blond idiot sighed and leaned over, nuzzling against its wicked beak. He looked for all the world like he was _comforting_ the bird. Maybe he was.

"Fire's going out," he said, standing up again. He found the bucket Eagle kept his firewood in and fed it slowly to the flames, watching as the wood kindled and the fire jumped higher. The chill was starting to fade from the air.

When he turned around the blond was buried under the furs and the blankets, wedged against the far wall. He'd pulled them up over his nose, and in the firelight his eyes were golden. The eagle remained perched on the headboard over his head; with a grunt Kurogane picked up Ginryuu and staggered a little, finding the sword's weight had increased since he had last held her. "Here," he said, gruffly, and lay her, sheathed, in the centre of the bed.

The blond's gaze flicked between the sword and Kurogane, and then he sighed and turned deliberately so his back was to the ninja, facing the wall. It surprised Kurogane a little; with how goddamn _flirtatious_ Eagle was during daylight hours Kurogane had thought he'd have to pry the man off him at night. The silver locket he always wore had gotten twisted around his neck, and so as Kurogane lowered his aching, sore body to the bed he could see the crest stamped on it.

_Interesting_, he thought, as he pulled the covers over himself and turned away from Eagle, whose back felt cool against his but who was gradually heating up. _That was the royal seal of Valeria._

Making a mental note to confront the moron later, Kurogane closed his eyes.

* * *

><p>He was right in the end. It began snowing the next day, and it didn't let up for what seemed like years. Eagle hadn't been lazy about preparing for the weather; the carcasses hanging to dry from the rafters shared their space with dried vegetables, entire baskets of things like potatoes and onions stored in boxes under the bed. The hut felt darker and closer as the snow piled up outside, but the strange thing was that this didn't stop Eagle from going outside with his bird twice a day, at dawn and at dusk. Kurogane didn't try to follow him; now didn't seem like the time. He hadn't pushed the man on his Valerian locket, either.<p>

Nihon's border with Valeria was limited to a small spot in a mountain pass, with this forest standing between their countries, the cursed forest neither country wanted to claim. Kendappa hadn't cared about the tiny northern country for years, considering it neither a threat nor worth courting. At least, not until a man in Valerian-style wizard's robes arrived at her court seeking asylum.

He had been the former chief wizard of Valeria, he told them, kneeling before the raised dais with perfect Nihon manners despite his foreign face. He had served the King faithfully, but when Ceres invaded, there had been nothing he could do: his master's castle had been invaded, the man himself tried and executed in the Ceresian style before his own people. His body had been displayed outside the castle with that of his wife and closest advisors, while his wizard had been lucky to escape with his life. His name was Kyle, and he had begged Kendappa for sanctuary, and she had granted it in exchange for information regarding Ceres.

Kurogane trusted Kyle about as far as he could throw the weasel little man; in his opinion he should have stayed and died beside his master, for that was the point of service. Still, the peasants of Valeria had mostly confirmed this story when Kurogane questioned them, although they hadn't had many kind words for either their dead king or their deposed court wizard. They welcomed their Ceresian invaders, who had brought discipline and law and prosperity, cleansing the country of the taint of its former royal family: the mad King who was rumored to have indulged in all sorts of depravities. The common folk were rife with unconstructive rumors about just what depravities those consisted of, but all generally agreed they had been terrible. Why else would the gods have sent the plagues, the droughts, the flash-freezes and avalanches for all those years of his rule?

King Ashura had also executed the Queen, who had refused to leave her husband's side, and the young prince and the only heir to the throne. There was some confusion over Prince Fai's fate; Kurogane and his squad had infiltrated many different parts of Valeria's capital city, talking to hundreds of people, and it seemed nobody had their stories straight when it came to the young prince. He had been executed with his parents, his body nailed up beside theirs, or he hadn't; Ashura had killed him personally and buried him with honors, or had him killed away from the eyes of the court and buried him in an unmarked grave, or let him live. There were actually two princes. There was just one prince and a 'seeming' brother, which Kurogane took to mean some kind of illegitimacy.

Some said the 'seeming' brother had been killed instead of the prince, and the prince himself was under Ashura's control, learning statecraft at the King's hand. Some said both the prince and his bastard sibling were demons who had driven Valeria down to its knees, and when Ashura broke into the castle they were supposed to have turned into terrible bat-like creatures with twisted men's faces and fled justice through an open window.

Kurogane kind of doubted that last one.

It didn't help that the takeover had happened years ago. Kyle had turned up on Kendappa's doorstep almost seven years past, and though Kurogane trusted his Princess with everything he had, he wasn't sure what Tomoyo had been looking for when she'd sent him to sniff around a six-year-old mystery. By the time he'd arrived most people had forgotten the events of that night; the King and Queen and, if he had been there, the Prince's bodies had been pulled down from the gallows and burned, their bones interred in a plain patch of earth in the castle's courtyard. Tomatoes grew out of it now.

The only thing he had been able to find of the former royals was an old picture, left to weather and crack and stuck up inside the inn; it had evidently once had pride of place inside the castle, but Ashura had thrown it out after he had taken over and the enterprising innkeeper had brought it back down to the village. It was an expensive painting of the former King and his wife in their robes of state, near as Kurogane could tell; the innkeeper had let his patrons throw knives at the canvas for a fee for years, and the painting was spectacularly defaced. The King had no head left, and some genius had drawn cat ears, a mustache and spectacles on the Queen. All Kurogane could tell from the painting was that the King had been tall and the Queen had perhaps had blonde hair, under years of graffiti.

Eagle could perhaps have told him more, if the man wasn't mute. He was obviously Valerian; his pale coloring gave that away, as did his blond hair and blue eyes, as well as his host of little mannerisms: his use of pot-metal knife and fork instead of chopsticks, his clothing and winter survival skills, even the way he cooked. While some of his tools were clearly Nihonjin in origin, Kurogane suspected he had traded for them, a suspicion that was confirmed when he was cleaning up inside the hut during one of the blond's dawn trips outside and found a basket under the desk that contained cakes of dye, rough, unrefined stuff in waxpaper that would nevertheless get him basic things like tools at any of the northern Nihon villages.

Kyle hadn't mentioned the prince of Valeria at all, but the peasants had known exactly how old the dead royal was supposed to be. They claimed his father had lost his sanity at the prince's birth. He'd be in his early twenties by now, like Eagle, and he'd have no reason to stay in a country that loathed him. He wouldn't go to Ceres, obviously, and perhaps he wouldn't go to Nihon, for fear of the reception he might receive there.

It seemed to Kurogane that Eagle was a lot more than a silent man in the woods. He just didn't know how to discuss his connection with the dead deposed royals of a whole country with a man who wouldn't, or couldn't, speak, and who had been hiding out in solitary for years.

He'd have to have a closer look at the locket, he decided, before he pushed the confrontation.

* * *

><p>Kurogane got his chance during one particularly cold week, too cold to leave the hut for any length of time. Eagle had retrieved some firewood and suspended a pot of snow over the cauldron of soup to melt, and had managed to convey, with his by-now customary hand gestures, that they were to use the water to bathe when the snow had finished melting. He also helpfully suggested Kurogane go first, since he smelled worse, and after telling him to shut the hell up Kurogane tried to subtlety sniff his own armpits when Eagle wasn't looking. He was unfortunately forced to agree with him. Sickness and a long period of confinement weren't doing him any favors in that regard, and he missed the bathhouses back home rather fervently.<p>

He stripped to the waist and washed himself with a sense of relief once the snow had melted, making sure to get the area behind his ears and around the back of his neck. Eagle sat on the end of the bed while he did this, pretending to toy with something but eyeing Kurogane out of the corner of his eye and being incredibly obvious about it; the man had the same sense of stealth as Kurogane's dead _horse_.

While he was washing he peeled his latest set of bandages off and checked out the wounds; they had healed up enough that even the scabs were receding, although the arrow-wound left a puckered web of scar tissue that pulled on his muscle when he moved his shoulder and was likely gonna guarantee arthritis when he got older. If he did get older.

The slash mark to his ribs had healed up neater, but it still left a long shiny ribbon of pink scar, curving all the way around his side from his navel to just under his right armpit. It was still a little red around the edges, but it wasn't the fever-hot of infection, and he cleaned it out gingerly, careful not to soak the scab too much. He wasn't going to be winning any beauty awards anytime soon, which was just fine with him.

"Your turn," he told Eagle, and was surprised at how scratchy his voice sounded. He didn't talk much to the blond or his bird; he had gotten into the habit of communicating like he did, with hand gestures and mimes. Eagle looked up from the item in his hand - one of his more battered broadheaded hunting arrows, the fletching at the base half-fixed - and pretended to be surprised; Kurogane shrugged his robe back on and scowled at him. "Get on with it," he said. "You're not exactly fresh smelling yourself."

The eagle squawked as if agreeing with him, and Eagle pulled a face at his pet and slid the arrow back into the basket he kept them in. He climbed to his feet and edged carefully around Kurogane to the cauldron, undoing his robe as he did so; he hesitated with his fingers caught on the hem and glared at Kurogane, twirling his finger to indicate Kurogane should look away.

"Why?" Kurogane asked, sitting back on the bed and running both hands through his damp hair. "Hiding something?"

Eagle rolled his eyes and folded his arms across his chest, and Kurogane snorted in disdain and turned away to give the damn idiot his privacy. It wasn't like the man had anything Kurogane hadn't seen before, and vice versa.

Still, he kept the pale man in his peripheral vision as he fished around in the man's basket of arrows, setting himself to repairing the fletching as Eagle divested himself of his clothing, striping off robe and tunic and leggings until he stood in nothing but his underwear, standing shivering slightly before the fire. It wasn't _that_ chilly in the hut - whatever substance he used to draft-proof the walls worked wonders - but it was still cold, especially on skin freshly revealed under all that fur and leather. Eagle folded his clothes and put them on the bed; the silver locket stuck out against the pale skin, on a long chain that wound around his neck. The locket itself hung down his chest, and Eagle carefully hooked his thumbs in it and put it to one side, atop his clothing.

Kurogane meant to go for the locket, but paused, the corner of his eye on Eagle; his shaggy hair had grown out even further since Kurogane had arrived, bound away from his face with a thin leather cord, and he was skinny enough his spine was visible, each bump a faint dent against the skin. Kurogane was sure if the man turned around his ribs would be evident too, and for a second he felt guilty, abruptly, that he was depriving this man of food. That wasn't what had drawn his attention away from the tantalizing glint of the locket, shining at him from Eagle's dark bundle of clothing.

It was the scars criss-crossing the skin of his back.

They were numerous, and there was no apparent pattern to them; they striped his skin like whipmarks, cutting in every direction at once: vertical, horizontal, diagonal. They had the faded, faint appearance of childhood wounds, scars that have been outgrown, but they had evidently been deep at the time. Kurogane flexed his left hand slowly, the old scar covering his palm seeming tighter now than it had ever had. Eagle rolled his shoulders lazily, cricking his neck to side to side, and then his bird chirped at him; he started and peered back over his shoulder to see Kurogane staring, and his face broke into a slow grin.

"Oh, shut up," Kurogane said. "Get on with it."

Eagle smirked at him and slid a hand around his side, his thumb rubbing at his back, and poked his tongue out between his lips; he waggled his eyebrows flirtatiously. Kurogane snorted and turned away.

"Not if you were the last idiot in the forest," he said, going back to the arrows, and saw the way Eagle's mouth curved in a smug grin out of the very corner of his eye.

He pretended to busy himself with the arrow until he was quite sure both the blond and the bird weren't watching him before snitching the locket, and turned to angle his shoulder against him and its owner. It was real silver, with a small silversmith's mark stamped onto the back; the seal was a work of art itself, intricately depicting the Valerian royal family's coat of arms: a phoenix rising from a bonfire, wings spread and crest sticking upright, long tail feathers snaking in a vague _s_ shape.

The clasp was tricky, and he had to wedge his thumbnail into the gap and lever quite hard to force it open. Once it was the hinges were quite stiff, which went to figure; the crown prince wore it every day and although he might take it off before bathing, Kurogane had never seen the blond pay much attention to it in the form of maintenance.

There were two miniature portraits, one tucked into each wing of the locket, but someone had taken a knife to the one on the left and slashed it rather ruthlessly out of its frame. The tiny fragment of picture left indicated it had once contained an image of a man.

The one on the right, however, showed the former Queen, without the years of hatred and knife-throwing and graffiti her image in the Valerian inn had accumulated. It had been an expensive miniature, for the pigments were still strong. She smiled prettily out of the locket, her blue eyes as bright as Eagle's. Her son, Fai - not his illegitimate brother, Valeria had been a patriarchy and there was no way a Queen's bastard would have been recognized as such - shared her jawline and cheekbones, her narrow aristocrat's nose, her pale gold hair.

Kurogane snapped the locket closed and pinched at the bridge of his nose, sighing.

"So," he said, turning back around, because he wasn't going to sit here clutching the blond's secrets in silence. "I take it you weren't fond of your old man?"

Eagle - _Prince Fai_ - froze in the act of undoing his ponytail; his hands fell slowly away from his hair, the cord caught in his grip and his ash blond hair spilling loosely over his shoulders. His blue eyes were fixed on the locket, open in Kurogane's palm, the chain tangled around his fingers.

"A word of advice: hermits don't usually have lockets stamped with the royal family's coat of arms," he said, untangling the chain and holding the locket out. Fai took it, moving stiffly and woodenly, still looking somewhat dazed; his eyes flicked down to the locket back in his hand and then to Kurogane before a scowl flicked over his face like a thunderhead.

_You have no right,_ he mimed, with furious and jerky hand gestures, adding a suggestion for Kurogane to self-pleasure himself with something sharp. Kurogane wondered briefly when he had gotten so good at interpreting the blond's vague mimes, and guessed it was familiarity.

"Yeah," he said, not apologizing because apologizing would put him on the defensive. "Probably. I heard about you when I was in Valeria. You never asked me what I was doing there, did you?"

Fai shook his head, and then conveyed with a swipe of his palm and his fierce scowl that he didn't care. His jaw was set, his eyes hard, but Kurogane thought he saw a glint of something worse than rage hiding in them: fear.

"My princess sent me," he said. "Princess Tomoyo of Nihon. She had a dream, you see, that _something_ was happening up here, but she didn't know where or what. I came up here with nine other ninja, to find out what I could. They're all dead now, the others. The Ceres guards got them."

Something flashed over Fai's features, and his adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. His mask fell for a moment, and for less than a heartbeat Kurogane saw in his face neither rage nor the teasing idiot he'd been, but a boy, the scared boy who had gotten whipped.

_I heard the prince had a seeming brother._

_I heard the old king liked torturing kids._

_I heard he had a son, but the son was what bought evil on us, so he had the kid dealt with. If you know what I mean._

"What happened to your brother?" Kurogane asked, on a hunch, and Fai gasped like he'd been slugged in the gut, physically recoiling from him, the locket spilling from his nerveless hands to fall silently into the fur rug on the hut floor. The eagle hissed, taking off from its perch and flying at its master, and even in the grip of his reaction Fai held out his arm so it could land; its powerful claws tore wet red strips out of his forearm.

It was pretty much the answer Kurogane had expected. Of course the bastard brother wouldn't be allowed to live, if the real prince had had to run away to keep himself alive. Still, he averted his eyes as the eagle flipped its wings to its back, crooning softly to its master, who held it close as his shoulders shook. Kurogane had never seen any of the birds in the mews at home do anything like that. It didn't surprise him; he had decided before now that it wasn't an ordinary bird, and knowing now that its master was the son of the magically inclined tyrant king of Valeria just cemented his suspicions: it was most likely his familiar.

"How did you end up here? Did you run away? Or..." He paused, trying to think of some alternative. He couldn't think of a scenario in which a prince, however mistreated and magically inclined he might be, would learn the woodsman skills necessary to survive, alone, in a forest like this one, let alone thrive here.

Fai shook his head, but refused to elaborate or meet Kurogane's eyes. His bird was glaring at him, although with all raptors it was hard to tell when they were giving the evil-eye or simply looking. Kurogane sighed and bent down despite the way it stretched the scar tissue over his ribs, picking the locket up from the carpet again, and put it on top of Fai's clothing.

"I'm not here to... to hurt you, or anything," he said. "You saved my life. My princess only gave me orders to scout, and, well, I've scouted Valeria and I didn't find anything. I'm not going to lie to you, 'cause I hate liars: when I go home I will tell my princess I found you, but..." he sighed, scratching roughly at the back of the neck. Gods, he was a miserable failure when it came to these kinds of talks. He much preferred body language, but as Fai attested some things couldn't or shouldn't be conveyed with anything but speech. "Look... Nothing's going to happen to you. Okay? My princess will leave you alone if that's what you want. And I've got better things to do than harass you."

Fai made a soft snorting sound of disbelief at this, but he was watching Kurogane again, not ducking eye contact, which was a plus. His eagle blinked at Kurogane distrustfully and flexed its claws, making its master flinch slightly. Fai's hair was still messy and loose around his face, and the blood the bird had drawn with its talons dripped messily to the floor, and Kurogane sighed deeply and stood up.

"I'm going outside," he said, sliding his boots on. Fai watched him in silence, not that the blond had much of a choice. "Finish up with the water. I..." he trailed off, swallowed, then decided to hell with it. "I won't ask you anything more for now. But... if you want to tell me, and you can work out a way around the whole... no talking thing, I'll listen. And how many people can you say that about?"

He turned away from the blond then, embarrassed at having exposed himself like that, and spotted Ginryuu lying still in the center of the bed, marking the line between his half and Fai's. With a sense of relief he scooped her up. Some sword katas felt about right for now.

He pulled a cloak off the back of the door and paused before opening it, one hand on the latch and his blade resting heavy and familiar over his shoulder. He wasn't sure if Fai would let him back in if he left, and then he'd die of exposure, and he really didn't want those to be his last words.

"Thanks for saving my life, idiot," he said, still avoiding eye contact, and then pushed open the door and stepped out into the bone white world beyond.

_-tbc_


End file.
